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Bosphorus, but the Avars’ was the first genuine attempt to
conquer Constantinople, in alliance
with the Persians and with their subjugate Slavic warriors. The failure of this siege proved a
disaster for the Danubian khaganate, almost precipitating its complete collapse. The defeated
Avars, torn by internal disputes because of the greatly weakened khagan, effectively fell out
of sight for several decades for Byzantine writers, who were becoming more concerned with
decisive clashes with the Persians and soon after that with Arabs.
The catastrophe of 626 also gave considerable succour to the position of Slavs who
joined the uprisings under Samo. According to the Fredegar Chronicle, which does not seem
entirely reliable in terms of chronology, Samo joined the Slav revolt in the territory of today’s
Czech Republic and Slovakia in 623, which would mean that the breakaway of the Avar
khaganate’s western flank began before the great crisis of 626. Samo, a Frank by birth and
probably a weapons trader, exploited the opportunity to take the fight to the Avars and become
ruler (king, until his death in 658) of a central European union, the first Slavic polity known
to history. Its centre was north of the Danube, but it included the area of the Eastern Alps later
known as Carantania. In 630, the Frankish king, Dagobert I, organised an unsuccessful
attempt to destroy Samo’s realm, uniting Frankish and Alamannian warriors with Lombards,
who could only have acted against their Alpine Slav neighbours. Around 623 to 626, the
Friulian Lombards had already wrested control of “the district of the Slavs, called Zellia” in
Val Canale. This was the first time that Slavic lands were brought into dependence on Friuli,
and the Slavs there were to pay tribute to the Lombard duke in Cividale del Friuli until around
740. Probably not without reason, the Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum (The
Conversion of the Bavarians and Carantanians) – a text dating back to 870 in Salzburg and the
most important historical source for the eastern-Alpine and Pannonian region in the eight and
ninth centuries – also links Samo with the very earliest Carantanian history.
At that time, the Alpine Slavs, called also Vinedi, who were part of Samo’s political
union, also had their own prince known as Vallucus, who ruled the border area known as the
‘March of the Wends’ (Marca Vinedorum). This name, attributed by a contemporary Frankish
chronicler, bears indirect witness to the fact that the Slavic eastern Alpine area between the
Bavarians and Lombards was the border region of something greater, i.e. Samo’s political
community. Prince Vallucus and his Slavs were joined around 631/632 by a group of Bulgars
led by Alzeco (Alciocus). He was one of a group of Bulgar pretenders who had wanted to
exploit the crisis in the Avar khaganate that followed the catastrophe of 626 by taking control.
However, the group suffered a defeat and fled from Pannonia with 9,000 men, together with
women and children, to the Bavarians who, after an initial welcome, murdered several
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thousand of them on the orders of the Frankish king Dagobert I – an early Bavarian precursor
of the Saint Bartholomew massacre. Only Alzeco’s group escaped, and fleeing once more
were received by Vallucus. Alzeco’s Bulgars remained with the Alpine Slavs for around thirty
years, a generation, in the nascent Carantania, before migrating after 662 to Benevento, in
Lombard Italy.
After Samo’s death in 658 the Avars renewed their supremacy of most of Slavic
central Europe, but not over the Carantanian Slavs, who as the Alzeco episode indicates, were
independent of all their neighbours: the Bavarians and Franks; and the Lombards and Avars.
Only eight decades later, in around 740, did Avar pressure grow so much that the
Carantanians, under their prince, Borut, were forced to recognise Bavarian overlordship in
return for their aid against their eastern neighbours.
The Avars also restated their supremacy south of the Karavanke mountains after the
middle of the seventh century – if indeed it had ever been broken – and the khaganate once
more stretched to the borders of Friuli in Italy. Around 664, at the behest of the Lombard king
Grimoald, the Avars attacked Friuli and defeated and killed the usurping duke of Friuli,
Lupus, probably near Ajdovščina, at the Hubelj river (fluvius Frigidus) in the Vipava valley,
approximately where Emperor Theodosius (a Christian) had defeated Eugenius, his pagan
rival, in 394. Paul the Deacon, a Lombard by birth from Cividale, who wrote of these events
at the end of the eighth century, also reports that Arnefrit, son of the defeated usurper, fled in
fear of Grimoald “to the tribe of Slavs in Carnuntum, which is erroneously called
Carantanum” (ad Sclavorum gentem in Carnuntum, quod corrupte vocitant Carantanum).
Although the term Carantanum does not belong to the time that Paul was describing,
but to the end of the eighth century, when he wrote his History of the Lombards, this is the
oldest undisputed reference to the name. The educated Friulian historian – like many writers
of the time – maintained ethnographical traditions and described new facts in ancient terms.
He therefore explains Carantanum as a popular, erroneous, rendering of the ancient name
Carnuntum, (an ancient fortress
east of Vienna on the Danube, known today as Petronell),
which actually had no connection with Carantania. Paul’s report clearly shows that the
Carantanians’ tribal name – probably first mentioned by an anonymous cosmographer from
Ravenna as Carontani – was derived from the local or regional name for the area in which
they lived. The name was originally connected with the area around Zollfeld (Carentana) and
Ulrichsberg (Mons Carentanus), where the civitas Carantana (Karnburg) and ecclesia sanctae
Mariae ed Carantanam (Maria Saal) stood. The name came to refer to the entire
area ruled by
the prince from Karnburg. The name is not only pre-Slavic, but also of pre-Roman origin;